Montclair Prep’s Letter Winner : Prep football: Heavily recruited Swinton climbs state rushing list, leads Mounties into semifinals.

Oscar Swinton was thumbing through the most recent batch of recruiting letters to his son, Eliel, who had gone to his bedroom to haul down the box filled with the rest of them.

“Here’s one from Notre Dame that he hasn’t opened yet,” Oscar said.

Eliel arrived with the box and plopped it on the living room floor. There they were. His tickets to the college of his choice. About 300 letters from 50 schools.

“From the beginning we had all of them arranged by school,” Eliel said as he sifted through the letters, “but then we got lazy.”

The recruiting process is hardly at the top of Swinton’s priority list. A day earlier, he passed up tickets from USC to the Trojans’ game against Notre Dame.

“I was too tired,” he said.

Swinton has been busy. Busy climbing to third on the state’s all-time rushing list with 5,456 yards. Busy leading Montclair Prep to an 11-0 record and a berth in tonight’s Division IX semifinal against Nordhoff. Busy keeping his grade-point average at a level befitting a future physician. Swinton, whose list has been narrowed to UCLA, Notre Dame, Stanford, Colorado and Oregon, is more than a football player. He wants to use the sport to pave the way to medical school.

“I definitely want to be a doctor,” said Swinton, who carries a 3.6 GPA in an advanced curriculum. “I don’t want anything to stop me.”

Swinton, 17, already has met the NCAA minimum score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test by scoring 840 last summer. But he is taking it again, he said, because he had chickenpox the first time and was dissatisfied with the score.

Phone calls to Swinton before 9 on school nights will not be answered. That’s when he studies. Dad’s orders.

“(My friends) know how strict my dad is,” Swinton said.

Oscar Swinton, something of a stage father, beams when he talks about his son. Asked whether he would rather see him play in the NFL or become a doctor, he answered flatly: “Both.”

Asked if his son is the best running back in the San Fernando Valley, he answered without hesitation, “Yes.”

A biased opinion? Of course. But Oscar knows football. He has coached in youth leagues for 14 years, four of those with Eliel on his team. Oscar molded Eliel’s early football experiences, then turned him over to the coaches at Montclair Prep.

Sort of.

Oscar, a computer programming consultant, is ever-present at Mountie games, standing on the press box roof with a video camera, as he has during the Montclair Prep careers of his other sons, Rich, a 1986 graduate, and Jamal, a 1989 graduate.

When Eliel returns home from a game, there is dad, videotape in hand, ready to review his son’s performance.

“I get pressure (from my father),” Swinton said. “I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t, but the criticism is constructive.”

More often than not, Swinton has made the right moves. A few more and he can break a record he has been aiming at for years.

Rich, who played for Washington State, holds the Montclair Prep single-season rushing record of 2,265 yards. Eliel needs 310 to break the record, which is reachable if the Mounties win tonight and play in the championship game next week.

“We knew there would be a day when Eliel would be the greatest of us all,” said Rich, 24.

Oscar said he could see it when Eliel began playing football at age 7. “He was always the star on offense and defense,” he said. “He was feared by other kids.”

Once at Montclair Prep, Swinton grew quickly in both reputation and stature. He shot up from 5-foot-5 in his freshman year to 5-8 by his sophomore year and to 5-10 by the end of that season.

Swinton, 185 pounds and still 5-10, immediately was thrown into the fray as a sophomore because of the transfer of Derek Sparks to Mater Dei. While opening the door for Swinton in one sense, Sparks unwittingly closed another.

The controversy over Sparks’ recruitment to Montclair Prep resulted in the school being placed on probation for the 1991-92 school year. Among the penalties imposed on the school was a ban from the playoffs during that school year.

“In 10th grade I thought it was all a joke,” Swinton said of the allegations regarding Sparks. “I didn’t think anything was going to happen to us. Then I was mad because I couldn’t get more yards and another ring (in 1991).”

Swinton, who rushed for precisely 3,500 yards in 22 games during his sophomore and junior years, carried that anger into this season. The Mounties have hammered opponents by a combined score of 431-69.

Swinton, who also plays defensive back, has confirmed the beliefs of recruiters who started asking about him two years ago. He has rushed for 1,956 yards and scored 21 touchdowns this season. All this despite being at the top of every opponent’s scouting report.

“Last week, (South Torrance) had a linebacker keyed to hit me on every play,” Swinton said.

Montclair Prep opponents must try something. Swinton, after all, is a cut above most Division IX players. Because of the relatively low level of competition, some have wondered if Swinton really was “big time.” Or is he merely a fast kid running through a bunch of 5-8, 160-pound linebackers who will never wear a football uniform after high school?

But Swinton performed well in a 300-player recruiting combine last spring in Downey. He also has worked with a speed trainer who cut his best 40 time from 4.5 to 4.45.

Need more proof that Swinton is for real? Try to lift the box of letters in his room. Swinton said he listens with a cynical ear when he is on the phone with Lou Holtz or Bill Walsh, whom Swinton said is “a good guy.”

“I know they’re all trying to feed me the line,” Swinton said. “And they all say the same thing. (The phone calls) get boring, but at least they’re calling.”